4 ms·

This is awesome! I spent a lot of time looking for a tool just like this and didn't find it. I've designed some simple-ish optical systems and I've been really

by mastax 4y ago

This is awesome! I spent a lot of time looking for a tool just like this and didn't find it. I've designed some simple-ish optical systems and I've been really frustrated by having trouble visualizing how different elements of the system will affect the light (especially moving parts). Also frustrating to have to calculate positions manually, etc. All the tools I could find were high-end quantum-optical simulators that cost more than my salary.

mastax 4y ago
It looks like it doesn't support mirrors or things like right angle prisms. Mostly targeting camera lenses, it seems. Not super useful to me at the moment. I'll be watching with interest.
- txg 4y ago
  Have you got any recommendations for open-source, or free, optics design software?
  - mastax 4y ago
    No, I never found anything satisfactory. I ended up using SOLIDWORKS with some 3D sketch lines and reflection constraints to approximate it.
    - aj7 4y ago
      I have done this myself, and I have a lot of experience in optics. I have also written a ray tracing program in Excel, which was able to reproduce aberration diagrams. By doing this first, I could use “professional” tools. Solidworks is excellent for reflective optics, and for prismatic, mainly planar systems. You can simulate Snell’s law either with an equation, or a simple construction using line segments of unit length, and of length equal to the refractive index of the surrounding medium. If you have nothing else, but you understand optics, you might get by with Solidworks. And there are commercial optics addins that have been written using the SolidWorks API.
  - qwezxcrty 4y ago
    No. There just isn't. It's a shame there are so many wheels for artistic rendering ray tracing with amazing performance, but simply no one bothered to invert camera as sources and objects as detectors, add more geometry and a tiny bit more of physics, and make a opensource non-sequential ray tracing engine suitable for optics design. Commercial tools like Zemax cost a leg (> $13k, and they were changing to subscriptions even before being bought by ANSYS) and have a rather steep learning curve. There are newcomers like COMSOL offering a ray tracing toolbox, haven't tried but they are offering generous free trials and the price seems to be more reasonable. Edit: maybe the abadonware Beam4 mentioned by another post worth trying.
  - joshvm 4y ago
    You can use some software for free with limitations eg OSLO https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download FRED also has a demo mode https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/ https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/ That might be enough for simple designs. Beam Four is also decent and allows you to use most common surface types including gratings. I'm interested in Optica (for Mathematica) but I don't know anyone that's used it.
euoia 4y ago
What sort of thing have you designed? I’m curious what the real world uses are for these sorts of tools.
- mastax 4y ago
  It was a kind of laser scanning instrument, for my job. Measuring the intensity of reflected light. Don't want to get into it too much.
  - samstave 4y ago
    Stealthy answer
_flux 4y ago
So I'm quite uninformed on the topic, but why can't modern path tracing raytracers do this? They don't help with calculating positions, though, but might they still be suitable for checking the results?
- zokier 4y ago
  You might be interested in reading https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/ https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/

by mastax 4y ago

mastax 4y ago

It looks like it doesn't support mirrors or things like right angle prisms. Mostly targeting camera lenses, it seems. Not super useful to me at the moment. I'll be watching with interest.

txg 4y ago
Have you got any recommendations for open-source, or free, optics design software?
- mastax 4y ago
  No, I never found anything satisfactory. I ended up using SOLIDWORKS with some 3D sketch lines and reflection constraints to approximate it.
  - aj7 4y ago
    I have done this myself, and I have a lot of experience in optics. I have also written a ray tracing program in Excel, which was able to reproduce aberration diagrams. By doing this first, I could use “professional” tools. Solidworks is excellent for reflective optics, and for prismatic, mainly planar systems. You can simulate Snell’s law either with an equation, or a simple construction using line segments of unit length, and of length equal to the refractive index of the surrounding medium. If you have nothing else, but you understand optics, you might get by with Solidworks. And there are commercial optics addins that have been written using the SolidWorks API.
- qwezxcrty 4y ago
  No. There just isn't. It's a shame there are so many wheels for artistic rendering ray tracing with amazing performance, but simply no one bothered to invert camera as sources and objects as detectors, add more geometry and a tiny bit more of physics, and make a opensource non-sequential ray tracing engine suitable for optics design. Commercial tools like Zemax cost a leg (> $13k, and they were changing to subscriptions even before being bought by ANSYS) and have a rather steep learning curve. There are newcomers like COMSOL offering a ray tracing toolbox, haven't tried but they are offering generous free trials and the price seems to be more reasonable. Edit: maybe the abadonware Beam4 mentioned by another post worth trying.
- joshvm 4y ago
  You can use some software for free with limitations eg OSLO https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download FRED also has a demo mode https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/ https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/ That might be enough for simple designs. Beam Four is also decent and allows you to use most common surface types including gratings. I'm interested in Optica (for Mathematica) but I don't know anyone that's used it.

euoia 4y ago

What sort of thing have you designed? I’m curious what the real world uses are for these sorts of tools.

mastax 4y ago
It was a kind of laser scanning instrument, for my job. Measuring the intensity of reflected light. Don't want to get into it too much.
- samstave 4y ago
  Stealthy answer

_flux 4y ago

So I'm quite uninformed on the topic, but why can't modern path tracing raytracers do this? They don't help with calculating positions, though, but might they still be suitable for checking the results?

zokier 4y ago
You might be interested in reading https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/ https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/